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06 August 2009

Real Leaders Shovel It, apparently

There’s been a silly exchange of letters to the editor the past couple of weeks between a fellow named Matthew Pike and the John Hickey. Hickey took time out from shovelling pavement to shovelling something else in response to a letter from Pike.

The whole thing is silly because Pike started out by kicking Hickey over the foolish government position on the Goose Bay airbase. It’s pretty silly for Pike to try and hold Hickey to account for a position which is based on holding John Hickey’s federal political buddies to a promise anyone with half a clue knew was total bullshit when it was uttered. Hickey campaigned for the federal Connies a couple of times while the federal Connies were running hard on the bullshit promise of a battalion of soldiers for Goose Bay. Now he is slagging them off for not delivering. Pike was poking Hickey for supposedly not doing more to push for bullshit.

Anyway, the exchange got sillier considering that the best come-back Hickey could toss at Pike is that Pike is a staffer at the provincial Liberal Party office. Maybe he is. Maybe he isn’t. It’s really irrelevant given the inherent foolishness of Hickey’s position on Goose Bay. That’s also really not much of a point coming from a cabinet minister in a party which relies so heavily on plants in the media.

Enter Shannon Tobin.

Tobin decided to dip his oar into the exchange this week in a letter the editor thankfully decided to leave off the newspapers website. He didn’t point out the obvious. Instead he decided to back Hickey. After starting out with a couple of paragraphs based entirely on Pike’s employment status, Tobin drops this wet kiss:

Now I am proud to state that I support the Progressive Conservative party of Newfoundland and Labrador mainly because I know that the PC party has and continues to show a lot more respect towards Labrador than the Liberals ever did.

After accusing someone else of partisanship, Tobin tosses his own partisan affiliation on the table in such glowing – and entirely irrelevant - terms. The rest of the letter continues the unqualified partisan praise for Hickey - nothing on the Goose Bay base issue itself, by the by - before finishing with the assurance from Tobin that “the view from Lake Melville with John Hickey as our MHA is a bright and magnificent one.”

Takogo kak Hickey: There’s something about a man in hard hat and safety vest, apparently. In a letter to The Labradorian, Shannon Tobin credits Hickey with bringing benefits to central Labrador:“… including the fact that we finally will have some much needed pavement placed on the TLH…it is quite clear that John Hickey is a real leader and there isn’t any need for a change.”

Tobin’s letter is such an over-the-top love letter to John Hickey’s political backside one can easily conclude one of two things: either Tobin is applying for a job in Hickey’s office via The Labradorian. Or he’s been applying already but has had no luck in the hunt for Hickey-related work thus far.

Now of course, there’s no reason to doubt Tobin’s sincerity. He likely believes every partisan word of what he wrote but, in the ordinary course, one does not usually see even the most blind of congenitally blind partisans weighing in to an essentially trivial bun fight between two other partisans unless there is something else going on.

About the only thing Tobin wrote which likely reflected the views of the majority came in his second sentence: “I am a little displeased that some would take advantage of this option [writing a letter to the editor] for seemingly political motives.”